Adam Mendelsohn
Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies
Phone: 843-953-2036
E-mail: mendelsohna@cofc.edu
Adam Mendelsohn joined the Jewish Studies Program in 2008. Much of his teaching and research focuses on Jews in the South. His is actively involved in the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina and the Southern Jewish Historical Society. He is currently working on a book about Jewish involvement in the second-hand clothing trade (the ‘shmatta business’) in the United States and the British Empire in the nineteenth century.
Education
PhD Modern Jewish History, Brandeis University
MA University of Cape Town
BA (Hons) University of Cape Town
Research Interests
American Jewish history, Jews in the British Empire
Courses taught
American Jewish history
Southern Jewish History
African Americans and Jews from Slavery to Civil Rights
Jews and Race
Honors and Awards
Wasserman Prize for best article in American Jewish History
Quadrennial Prize for best article in Southern Jewish History
Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies 2008-9
Recent publications
Jews and the Civil War, co-edited with Jonathan Sarna (New York University Press, May 2010)
“Great Britain, the Commonwealth and Anglophone Jewry”, Cambridge History of Judaism vol. 8 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
“From Moses to Moses: Jews, Clothing and Colonial Commerce” in Adam Teller and Rebecca Kobrin, eds., Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)
“Trading in Torah: Bootleg Bibles and Secondhand Scripture in the Age of European Imperialism” in Sarah Wobick and Gideon Reuveni, eds., The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn, 2011)
